Chang Yuchen: Coral Dictionary (60 Sentences)

Beijing Commune, 09/21-11/09, 2024

Beijing Commune is pleased to present “Coral Dictionary (60 Sentences),” Chang Yuchen's first solo exhibition with the gallery, showcasing a series of sixty pencil drawings on paper. Since her residency in Dinawan, Malaysia in 2019, Chang has been unwaveringly working on her unique language revolving around the corals she encountered and collected on the island. Employing writing, drawing, and performance, the Coral Dictionary series with a delicate and porous quality unfolds the rich textures in handwriting, translations, and communications, gently yet resolutely addressing themes of perception, understanding, and the relationship between the self and the surrounding.

In Chang's semiotic system taking corals as signs, she uses extremely detailed strokes of sharpened pencil to depict the stranded and naturally dried coral bodies. Neatly arranged, images of corals appear as a deep dive into nature, reminiscent of botanical and zoological illustrations. Nevertheless, they are not bodies of biological specimens for scientific eyes, nor will they be cataloged into different coral subclasses. On the other hand, what fascinates Chang is the unique shape each coral takes on during its symbiotic interaction with other organisms in the ocean as it grows and lives. With her intricate touches, Chang devotes herself to the indelible lives and memories in the seemingly monotonic forms that could once be reductively categorized into one kind of species.

As if following the rhythms of each coral’s breath, the detailed depiction of undulations and cavities reflects Chang's sympathy for the living experience in the folds. Each of the sixty paintings in the exhibition corresponds to sixty example sentences from Kamus Sari, a dictionary in Malay, Chinese, and English. All styles of writing and rhetorical forms—description, narrative, aphorism, and lyricism—inevitably appear a bit stiff in the print font of this linguistic manual. Yet when the artist stumbled upon the dictionary on Dinawan, she was immediately engrossed by the sentences that are infiltrated with life under waves of turmoil and integration in the local society. The sentences act like a mirror for Chang an outsider to the island and entice a reexamination of her own knowledge of, under modernization. For Chang, who is often torn by the loose, if any, symmetry in the translation between two divergent languages, Chinese and English, these sentences raise questions against the logos and ethos of translation and communication.

Lying at the heart of her rumination and art practices, “language” and ‘translation’ are crucial ways of life for Chang, who was born in northern China and spent more than ten years in a foreign land in the United States. Embodied experience on Dinawan has brought her an alternative type of relationship between the self and the surroundings. Whereas coral does not speak nor write yet constantly “communicates with the wind, the sea, and the hermit crabs,” the communication formed between the unformed words with the local people impelled Chang to recognize language as more than just a medium constituted by signs: “Language without words is like a soul without a body. It is free because it is intangible.” Moreover, for the artist, “translation” is not simply an act of converting one language into another, but also the forming of any kinds of feelings, perceptions, and expressions: translation is “a state of existence. Living is translation.”

In a logographic manner, each character in the Coral Dictionary arrives at its semantic meaning by provoking Chang’s imagination and feelings with the coral’s labyrinthic shape. Symbols in the Coral Dictionary appear to be both a divination and Chang's diarial whisper; Chang's performative reading alternates between a ritual and an intimate conversation that goes against the grain. For Chang, the often linear language and communication following the laws of economy conceive an idea of time that is, to use her words in describing the difference between logogram and phonogram, “impossible to linger.” The Coral Dictionary is not, after all, a language that overrides time.

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Special thanks to Dinawan Island and Offshore Residency Program

Text: Huang Sijia

Exhibition Design: Xi Jiajia

Video: Sheng Wei

Photo: Yang Wei, Xi Jiajia